[Using Sakai] Help with importing exams

[Marshall Feldman]

Hi everyone,

As the new academic year looms, I am completely frustrated in getting a 
textbook question bank into Sakai. I am hoping someone on this list can 
give me some help.

As background, my university is running Sakai 2.7. The textbook question 
bank comes from Pearson Publishing. Pearson provides it along with a 
software application called Testgen. Pearson also provides the question 
bank in Word files, one per chapter. I'm working on a Mac (Lion) with 
Windows installed via Boot Camp, as well as virtual machines under 
VirtualBox and individual Windows programs (notably Respondus) running 
as Mac applications via Wine. I'm also quite comfortable with the 
underlying Unix system and Unix shells.

Initially, I tried a three-prong approach. I first tried to see if I 
could get Testgen to export into a format that Sakai could import. 
Alternatively, I tried to get Testgen to export into format that 
Respondus could import. Although I've never imported Respondus output 
into Sakai, other people here seem to have had luck. Unfortunately, I 
was unable to get Respondus to import any of Testgen's export formats.

Second, I asked Pearson for help. Testgen can export non-text exam files 
only in formats native to Blackboard's products, but Pearson says it 
will help faculty members convert its test banks to other learning 
systems. I asked Pearson for such help, over six months went by, and 
Pearson finally got back to me saying, "Testgen does not support Sakai," 
which of course was why I asked for help in the first place.

Third, I asked our local support staff for help. Some time later a 
support person said he'd managed to do it, with some intermediate 
editing. Because I was afraid intermediate editing would be error-prone 
and time-consuming. Because this textbook is updated every few years, I 
really wanted an automated process. So I held off on trying this 
solution. When Pearson finally got back to me, I tried this alternative 
but could not get it to work. It turned out the support person had 
confused Respondus with Testgen. In other words, he can get Respondus to 
export in a format suitable for our version of Sakai, but Testgen still 
cannot export to it, even with Respondus as an intermediary.

So now I tried a different approach. I exported one of the Word files 
into a text format. The file has a format Sakai cannot understand, so  I 
wrote a Perl script to reformat the file. Following the advice of our 
local Sakai support, I then tried creating an exam "using markup text" 
and cutting and pasting the reformatted file into the exam.

This almost works, but Sakai seems to treat newline characters as the 
end of an answer choice. So if a question has one or more answers of 
several lines, Sakai accepts only the first line. I modified my Perl 
script to delete all but the last line terminator in each answer choice. 
But when I display the file in a text editor in order to cut and paste, 
the editor reinserts line terminators so the text will display well 
within the window.

The fact that neither Pearson's Word files nor Sakai's markup text 
option are virtually undocumented does not help. (When will software 
providers learn that examples are not same as precise, technical 
documentation explaining all rules and options?)

At this point, I'm about ready to scream. Because Pearson was getting 
back to me and I counted on at least one of these approaches working, I 
did not consider using another textbook. Unfortunately, Pearson's is by 
far the best for my purposes. Now it's too late to change books even if 
I wanted to.

Some of you answered an earlier post regarding importing directly from 
Testgen or Respondus, but it seems this requires Sakai 2.8. None of the 
suggestions worked here.

I am hoping one of you smart folks can help me. Please!

Thanks.

	Marsh Feldman